Harold Evans - Do I Make Myself Clear?: Why Writing Well Matters

The year 2016 was the seventieth anniversary of George Orwells classic polemic Politics and the English Language (1946) indicting bad English for corrupting thought and slovenly thought for corrupting language. The creator of Newspeak, as he called the fictional language of his nightmarish dystopia, Oceania, did as much as any man to rescue us, but eternal vigilance is the price of intelligent literacy. For all its benefits, the digital era Orwell never glimpsed has had unfortunate effects, not least making it easier to obliterate the English language by carpet-bombing us with the bloated extravaganzas of marketing mumbo-jumbo.

Words have consequences. The bursting of the housing bubble that led to the Great Recession revealed that millions had signed agreements they hadnt understood or had given up reading for fear of being impaled on a lien. But as the book and movie The Big Short make clear, the malefactors of the Great Recession hadnt understood what they were doing either. This book on clear writing is as concerned with how words confuse and mislead, with or without malice aforethought, as it is with literary expression: in misunderstood mortgages; in the serpentine language of Social Security; in commands too vague for life-and-death military actions; in insurance policies that dont cover what the buyers believe they cover; in instructions that dont instruct; in warranties that prove worthless; in political campaigns erected on a tower of untruths.

Fog everywhere. Fog online and in print, fog exhaled in television studios where time is anyway too short for truth. Fog in the Wall Street executive suites. Fog in the regulating agencies that couldnt see the signals flashing danger in shadow banking. Fog in the evasions in Flint, Michigan, while its citizens drank poisoned water. Fog in the ivory towers where the arbiters of academia all over the world are conned into publishing volumes of computer-generated garbage. Fog machines in Madison Avenue offices where marketers invent dictionaries of fluff so that a swimming cap is sold as a hair management system.there mud and mire too deep, never come there bureaucratic waffle so gross as to withstand the clean invigorating wind of a sound English sentence.

I like itits wonderfully editable.

Winston Churchill had problems talking to a table. His teachers at Harrow told him that the Latin word for table was mensa but if he wanted to invoke the thought of a tableaddress a table in the vocative casehe could not just blurt out the word. He must do as the Romans did and write or say, O mensa. To Churchills straightforward English way of thinking about such matters, it seemed absolute rigmarole to muck about with a good solid noun. He was further dismayed to learn it was not even permissible to talk about a table without changing its identity to mensae. Give these Romans an inch, and theyd take a passus.

In his captivating memoir My Early Life,